The divide, p.24
The Divide, page 24
I climbed out and looked at the white covers that seemed to spread for miles over the soy crop. They were quite low to the ground – less than a metre off the ground and supported by thin metal poles. I walked round the van and looked the other way. Inkman and the other men in black he had brought with him, tooled up and nasty, watched my every move. With my back to the soy, I was looking down a slope across a scrubby field littered with bushes and small trees, which broke up the view.
‘So where is it?’ asked Inkman, who had come up right behind me. I pointed between two large beech trees in the middle distance, and he peered. ‘Can’t see nothing there.’
‘Well, it is there,’ I said, trying to sound like I was certain.
‘Let’s get the drones up,’ he said, turning to one of his men. ‘Take a good look at that place.’
‘No!’ I said. That wouldn’t do. Within minutes, the drones would be looking down on the area I was pointing to and would see nothing but grass and scrub. Damn. What to say? ‘They’ll be keeping a lookout,’ I said. ‘If they see the drones, they’ll leave straight away.’ That seemed to make sense, because the men stopped unloading the drones. ‘You’ll just need to go there on foot,’ I said.
Inkman turned to the others, and they sorted out weapons and other gear and were ready to go. He turned to me and did this sort of mock-gentlemanly gesture and said, ‘After you.’ I made as though I was going to enter the field, then stopped. ‘I need a piss,’ I said.
He did a big sigh but he couldn’t argue.
‘I’ll go behind the van,’ I said, pointing back to the one we had just climbed out of.
Once I was round the far side of it, I found I was trembling. I was going to have to be fast and determined. I pulled the flare gun out of my pants, pointed it up into the sky and pulled the trigger. It had a surprisingly strong kick, and for a moment I just stood there as the light arced into the sky in the direction, I hoped, of where Kris was. And I also really, really hoped that he would spot it and realise it was a warning. Then I dropped the gun and dived under the vast covers and into the soy.
I wriggled fast because I only had, surely, a matter of seconds before they would be after me. From the shouts I heard, though, it sounded like they were confused about what had happened and where I might be. It helped that I was smaller than the men and could scuttle quickly between the metal poles. What also went through my mind in those mad minutes of trying to get away was that going through the tunnel had been good training for this. I crawled like a mad bug, pushing as fast as I absolutely could because there was no way back from this. They would kill me.
Plants were crushing under me as I crawled on like a mad beetle. Then the poles and the cover ended, and I was out in the open. I didn’t dare pause for a moment so ran straight for the first protection I could see and ran deep amongst the trees, desperate for somewhere to pause for a moment and get some breath. Somewhere safe – though nowhere was safe. I could hear men shouting orders to each other, though not as close to me as I feared. I dodged between trees and my feet caught in brambles which tried to trip me, but I did not dare fall, as I knew I would not have the strength to get up again.
A buzz above me – then another. Drones. That was all I needed; I couldn’t run out into the open now. And yet the trees were failing me. I could see brighter light ahead where the sun’s uninterrupted rays played down upon a field of grass or a crop. On the edge of this stood a darker shape, shades of brown and grey which, through the sweat and, who knows, maybe tears, which made my vision blurred, I guessed to be some sort of barn.
I had no choice – there was no going back and no going forward – so I pelted out of the cover of the last trees and headed straight for the building. Round the far side, I found the door and plunged through it. The dimness inside, compared to the sunshine outside, brought me up sharp, as I did not know what I might crash into.
Two people – an old man and a boy – stood, silent and still, staring at me. They held weapons, and I backed away before realising they were not weapons, just long forks. Strands of hay or straw hung off the forks. I had to get a grip. Not everyone was out to get me, to hurt me or to kill me or to imprison me. I needed to remember that; and I needed to be able to trust some people or I was lost forever. These were simply farmers, and all they were doing was stacking bales of hay.
‘People – chasing me,’ I panted. ‘Bad people.’
I had hoped they would rush to my aid, promise to hide me and protect me until the ‘bad people’ had gone away. Us little people against the system. But they simply stood. And that was the point when I saw the futility of everything. We had reached a time – gone well beyond the time – when no one person could trust another. It was no longer just about us versus the system, or versus the government, or versus the Dark Politic. It was that no individual person could assume that any other person was saying one word that was true, was doing any action that was genuine. Every single one of us, however ordinary, might have a double or triple agenda.
And yet, eventually, the old man stepped towards the boy and muttered something to him. The boy muttered back, all the while staring at me out of the corners of his eyes.
I stood, trying to calm my breathing while looking unthreatening and patient yet in urgent need of help. Difficult. I could feel my face twisting all over the place – they might in the end do something for me simply because I looked so weird. While thinking all these thoughts, I noticed the movement in the barn. And for the first time I heard it. The snuffling. Then one of the sources of the snuffling moved forwards to stand beside the boy. Wild boar. Oh my god, they had killer boars in here and they weren’t freaking out. I was ready to freak out, but this was not the time to start screaming. I pointed a waggly finger at it.
‘Wild boars!’ I said. The sound came out very high and feeble. The old man looked at it then back at me and suddenly burst out laughing. The boy laughed too, a ragged, mocking laugh. Oh dear god, what had I walked into?
‘That’s no boar, woman; that’s a pig,’ the old man said in a deep, husky voice.
I relaxed a little, though the beast was enormous and had tusks and evil little eyes fixed on me.
‘Oh, oh, that’s alright then. So it won’t hurt me.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
I was taking these words on board when the boy spoke up. ‘So you done something wrong then?’
‘No!’ There wasn’t time for long explanations. ‘I just need – I need not to be chased.’
Men’s voices could be heard now, shouting to each other, still a way off but getting closer. The old man turned his head in the direction of the sound, then looked back at me.
‘You’d better get behind them hay bales,’ he said finally. He sounded resigned; not too happy about it but like a person who finds they have no choice. ‘The lad’ll show you.’
The boy waved an arm to show I should follow him deeper into the barn. We weaved our way through the crowd of pigs. There must have been twenty or thirty milling around, snuffling at stuff on the floor and also at my feet and legs. I shuddered and tried to breathe slowly and steadily, but the stink was awful. The boy heaved a few bales to one side in the back corner of the barn and pointed between them.
‘Get in there,’ he said, ‘and I’ll shut you in.’ He touched my arm for a moment. ‘But you might need to stay in there a long time. Till they’ve definitely gone away.’ He looked up at me with gentle brown eyes. ‘I don’t want my grampy put in prison.’ He looked down. ‘He’d never last it.’
I nodded, then crept into my little hiding place. The boy moved the bales back in place and I found myself in semi-darkness though without, mercifully, pig shit to sit on. Through a narrow gap in the roof, I could see the blue of the sky. I waited and waited and watched the blue start to fade as evening approached.
I woke up and stared and felt around me in the almost total darkness. The stink was appalling but strangely comforting. Then the memories from the last forty-eight or so hours flooded my mind and my body started to shake and my fingers twitched as I remembered the drive, the crash, the hood, the cellar, then the realisation that still had me shaking my head in disbelief, that Marcus had betrayed me – that it was really true that he put his precious museum before anything, anyone, else. All that, followed by the van, the flare gun, the soy-covers and finally this barn, with the pigs, the old man and the boy. The fact that so much time seemed to have passed since I came in here suggested that they, at least, had not turned me in. There was some good in the world – or at least not all bad.
And Kris? Was he still waiting for me or had he given up and left? Left for who knows where? I had to finish the journey I’d started. I had to get that road map back into my head. The pigs were slumped around, dozing, and as I picked my way through them towards the door, they barely noticed me. Outside there was a water trough, and I cupped some of it in my hands and drank, thinking with wryness that a few months ago I would rather have died than share a drinking trough with pigs.
The open field sloped away ahead of me; the trees I had plunged through were behind. There were no people, no pursuers with guns. They had been recalled, I imagined, because they needed to be somewhere else urgently and now had bigger fish to fry than me. I heard, much later, about the assassination attempt on Aayan Andras, the Premier. That was what had brought about the swift withdrawal of my hunters. Aayan was no fool, but like all quasi-dictators, he spent his life running scared and put up a show of bullying and aggression to hide it. He had long ago set in motion a string of events that would happen should a serious attempt on his life be made: all Garda, Subgarda and security guards of any sort would be removed from all but the most essential duties and converge on his estate in north Oxfordshire where he would hole up. Other government employees would be sent hither and thither to take over the roles of those deployed on Premier protection. This meant that an awful lot of people were suddenly on the move. And in the days and weeks to come, this proved vitally helpful to all of us.
To get to Wayland’s Smithy I needed to go south, I knew that. Keep the White Horse and Uffington Castle mound to my left. Simple. The only question was: which way was south? If I was really clever, I could have navigated by the stars. I even looked up towards the black sky. Now, here’s a time when I might have wished the Astronomy Club was an actual astronomy club. I had no idea what time it was. I felt groggy and stiff and guessed I’d slept for hours. As I stood, breathing in the fresh dampness from the dew coming up from the field in front of me and stretching my neck and limbs, I noticed a very faint tinge of pale pink low down in the sky across to my right. East. Now I knew, and now I knew which way to head. I set off.
My legs were strangely weak and wobbly; no surprise because I had not eaten since god knows when. There was not much cover – open fields with darker edges that must have been hedges that swooped up and down, leaving me feeling horribly exposed to drones, like a tiny mouse scuttling along in dread of the swooping shadow of the eagle. For the moment, though, there seemed to be no other life around me. The country still slept, waiting for the dawn. But every minute that passed saw the sky growing lighter. Soon the little creatures would stir and head out in search of prey – as would the bigger creatures like those men who had been chasing me. Were they still searching? Was I so important that they needed to pursue their mission to hunt me down – or did they think they had scared me so much I would no longer dare threaten the status quo?
The lighter it became, the more vulnerable I felt. I didn’t even dare to think what I would do if Kris was not there. I crashed down beside the half-shelter of some bushes to catch my breath and noticed, rolling in from behind me, low, black clouds, serious rain clouds. It had not rained – not properly – for what, weeks? I got back to my feet and told myself I had to stagger on. I headed down a slope, the last down before the final up towards my final goal. Ahead, way ahead but at least visible now, I saw a stand of trees – the trees, I really, really hoped, that protected that special place, Wayland’s Smithy. Yet even as I looked at them, they began to blur and to fade away as though teasing me by retreating even as I approached. The rain started in earnest and soon soaked through my thin clothes. God this was miserable, but then, I realised, it was a huge help to me. No drones could fly in rain like this. Everyone’s vision was massively reduced, not just mine.
So I ploughed on and just focused on putting one foot in front of the other. I was on the last stretch, I hoped, a long and straight path. Huge shrubs, laden with shrunken elderberries moulding on the grey branches, and wild roses heavy with hips lined the left of the path while there was a thick bank of trees on the right. This was longer than I would have thought from my memory of the map, and there was nowhere to escape from anyone coming towards me from front or behind. This path was a shimmering white of solid chalk, compressed by thousands of years of people walking.
Abruptly, at the end of the path, I stepped into a thick ring of huge beech trees. I stood for a moment feeling part of them, and there was a magic feel to the place; Kris was right. The ancient trees surrounded the massive stones marking the Neolithic long barrow where I would find the Saxon smith-god. The upright stones guarding the entrance stood tall and proud, glistening now as the rain poured down them. I approached one and rested my hands on the hard, rough sarsen.
Apart from the swishing of the rain, I could hear nothing; no sign of life. I staggered round the great slabs until I found the entrance, plunged inside and fell to my knees.
A voice – a soft, croaky voice – echoed round the stone-lined cavity.
‘Petrichor.’ He spoke again and I knew it was him. Kris.
Then, as my eyes adjusted, I could see him. Crouched with his back against the cold wall, his arms round his knees.
‘Is it you?’
‘Yes.’ And I started to laugh hysterically, ridiculously.
27
Finally
I can’t believe how cold it is here. I’m on logging duty today, so that meant leaving the house well, well before dawn. Dad’s my logging mate for the morning; even now, we still have a rule that no one goes out of sight of the house on their own. Just in case. Though we’ve been here for, what, five months now?
We heave the last length of an ash tree’s trunk out into an open glade and set to with the saws. It certainly gets you warm, this job. I’m wearing leggings, jeans, waterproof trousers, two thick jumpers and a down jacket, and some of that now feels excessive. Then we stand the logs on end and split them with the axe. This is my favourite part. I’ve learnt to swing the axe freely from behind my shoulder, over my head and bring it down hard, right in the middle of the upended log, and watch the two halves fall apart very satisfyingly. At the beginning – in fact, for many, many, angry weeks – I pictured the head of that woman, Nadia, the bitch, or else the helmeted, black-clad motorcyclist who had shot Stefan. Sometimes, even, I pictured Noah as the edge of the blade came slicing down. But this morning, I just like to breathe in the sharp smell of frost and the warm, conifer-resin scent that flows from the split wood.
I heard, on the very tenuous grapevine, that the establishment Marcus had hung his loyalty hat on felt nothing of the same towards him. He lost his post at his beloved museum, lost everything.
We load our logs onto the sledge, take hold of the ropes and start to drag it back towards the store round the back of the house. Dad often talks about his plan to find a team of huskies and train them up to do this job. I know he’s only joking – where would he find them? But every time he mentions it, I think of the one and only Husky, Judith, and hope she is alright. We very rarely hear news from Oxford these days. We know we are safer if we keep our heads down.
After we stow the logs, Dad and I just stand, as we often do, and gaze up at the huge sky. We can’t get over the size of it, especially at night when we look at the stars – so many; I never knew there were so many. For some reason, the sheer quantity of them seems to bring the sky lower so that it almost looks like a net, not far above our heads, a black net dripping with tiny, shiny droplets of silver water. This morning, as we stand looking out over the low hills to the east, we can see the sky above them paling to a yellow-orange that announces the sunrise. We head into the house, banging the snow from our boots and shaking the ice crystals off our jackets before we hang them up. Hard to believe it is so cold. Global warming was supposed to give us, mild, wet winters after boiling summers, so they got that wrong.
I step into the kitchen and walk straight to the range to warm my hands, then turn round to heat up my butt. The crew are mainly ranged around the long table, tucking into breakfast while the day’s cooks, Stef and Jasmine, top up the teapots and ladle out scrambled eggs. I see Mum, Gran, Suyin, Lucas, Fen and Ju chatting or quietly laughing, elbows relaxed on the soft pinewood surface. The place was very sparsely equipped when we got here, and we have had to make do with what we have, in the main. There were not enough forks, we are one short, so there’s always a brief squabbling between the girls about who has to eat with a spoon. Today it is Fen, and she is wielding it with good grace; she has lost a tiny battle but the loss is already behind her because she knows it was such a minor thing. To be able to indulge in the art of bickering – the give and take, the response and riposte, the grumble and the counter-grumble – is one of the unexpected by-products of a sense of freedom. That, despite the enormous, universal problems of getting through life day by day, these children can find time to indulge in the gentle art of bickering makes me want to laugh. Despite it, or maybe because of it, those little girls have been brilliant. They never whinge or moan; not in the way Jasmine and I would have at that age. They just seem grateful every moment of every day to have their mum back.
